Politics and Corruption

Even to suggest the following equivalency — including the proposition that violence in both cases grew out of legitimate grievances — may seem offensive to many Americans.

But more than a dozen years after 9/11… to subject them, as historical events, to the critical analysis that episodes from earlier times and more distant places receive, is not to dishonour or belittle the victims.

Abstracted from that psychological context, the resemblance between Al-Qaeda’s language explaining its violence, and that of the earlier Protestant insurrectionaries castigating the acute corruption of the Catholic Church and its royalist allies, is unmistakable.

In a video sent to Al Jazeera in late fall of 2004, for example, Osama bin Laden emphasised the kleptocratic practices of Arab rulers — and US officials’ emulation of them — as he sought to correct what he saw as Americans’ misunderstanding of the motivation behind the 9/11 attacks.… The roughly comparable instances, from different centuries and religions, exemplify a persistent relationship between corruption and religious extremism.

In periods of acute, self-serving behaviour on the part of public leaders, Christians and Muslims alike have often sought a corrective in strict codes of personal behaviour derived from the precepts of puritanical religion. And they have imposed it, if necessary, by force.

Those who object to this remedy should look for other ways to cure the cause.